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July 27, 2008

Who is this guy?

That is the question. Or so one might think, and so says John Weaver, formerly a top political strategist for Republican presidential candidate, Senator John McCain.

McCain lost the week badly, let's be honest," Weaver said in a message on Friday. "John [McCain] is still in striking distance, thanks to his own character, biography and memories of the McCain of previous election cycles. But he cannot afford another week like this one."

Alex Castellanos, another Republican strategist, agreed that Obama had acquitted himself well overseas. " 'Barack goes global' is working," he noted. But he sounded a cautionary note, nonetheless. Obama, unlike McCain, he said, remains a work in progress who is still trying to answer the question, "Who is this guy?"

But as Barack Obama's Campaign 2008 World Tour comes to a close, adoring reporters including Dan Balz of the Washington Post, really don't care who he is. They wonder instead, will it work and get him elected president? He should be pulling away. Why isn't he?

Given the mismatch between the Obama and McCain campaigns over the past week, the other question for Obama is why the race for president remains as relatively close as it does. Obama said he believes that is because voters still have enough questions to keep them from committing.

There are reasons voters still have questions. While the trip was fraught with imagery and grandeur, there was little in the way of substance.

Substantively, the trip left questions for Obama. He struggled to square his opposition to the troop buildup in Iraq with the successes he witnessed and talked about. Obama initially said the buildup might even increase violence. Now that it has helped produce the opposite, McCain, rather than Obama, can claim he had superior judgment.

Not to worry. Obama's World Tour 2008 came to a close without any major gaffes. One minor mishap that occurred was dutifully ignored by the enraptured press corps.

The trip went smoothly save for one flap with the Pentagon over a planned visit by Obama to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Pentagon officials raised concerns about campaign aspects of the visit, and Obama's team scrubbed it, then tried to explain what they had been told that forced them to back away.

Looking for an opening, McCain accused Obama in a new ad of "going to the gym" while in Germany instead of visiting the wounded troops, and of doing so because the hospitals would not let television cameras film the event.

McCain said in an interview to be aired Sunday morning on ABC's "This Week" program that "if I had been told by the Pentagon that I couldn't visit those troops, and I was there and wanted to be there, I guarantee you, there would have been a seismic event," according to the Associated Press.

And that was the whole of his trip -- no gaffes. Substance is extraneous for a candidate of the left. With Obama image is literally everything, and he promises that image will carry the day. Adoring crowds were proof of it.

The message Obama hoped to send was that, after eight years of President Bush and rising anti-American sentiment in many countries, the United States could have a president the rest of the world admires.

"What I thought was useful was to give the American people some sense of how I was approaching these issues, but also to give them a sense that the world can be responsive to this approach and that it will make a difference," Obama said.

"[French President Nicolas] Sarkozy is much more likely to be able to provide more troop support in Afghanistan if his voters are favorably disposed towards us," he added.

We must forget that the elections of two distinctly pro-American heads of state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, argue that anti-American sentiment is not on the rise. We must also ignore that the only sense we've ever gotten of Obama's approach to issues is how he constantly and invariably adjusts his positions to fit the moment.

The occasion had been taken as an invitation to deliver a summary of Obama's view of America's role in the world. When his handlers decided to schedule a speech in Berlin, they teed up comparisons with the portentous speeches that Presidents Kennedy and Reagan had delivered there.

Instead, in the heart of Europe, before 200,000 breathless admirers, Obama pulled himself up to his full height, lifted his chin, unlimbered those eloquent hands, and said nothing at all.